Re: [-empyre-] Bare Life Is Not About Art

["Ana Valdes" <agora158@gmail.com>]

I feel great simpathy with your eloquent writing, but I am still going
to try to make Art about myh experience in a concentrations camp. The
jail in Uruguay did not qualify to the horrors of Auschtwitz, no
crematory ovens, not execution patrols...but we had all the "other",
the constant harassing, the dogs watching us work as forced labor in
the fields, move around stones to  place and move them again, the
Sysiphous work, I did it.
But it's not good to make level differences in horror, all what is
against the life and the freedom and the rights of people its wrong,
it's doesn't matter it's called Guantanamo or Gulag or Punta Rieles
(it was the name of my prison).
I saw Cavanis great film and loved Maus, I read Primo Levi and Kertes
and Dostoievskis description of his time in Sibirien, I read Ho Chi
Minhs books from the jail the French colonial power put him and
Mandelas book from Robben Islands.
Everyone who traversed such a journey must be able to write or tell
it's history, because Art is this, the ability to be a protagonist, to
use your own feelings and fear and desires to express yourself in the
form you choose.
Ana

On 7/7/06, G.H. Hovagimyan <ghh@thing.net> wrote:
> I don't believe that bare life has anything to do with art.  We are
> all on the edge of a potential tragedy.  Since I am of a certain age
> people around me are succumbing to various diseases. My brother-in-
> law is lying in a hospital bed in a stupor from a brain aneurism.  My
> poor sister is suffering terribly. One day everything is fine, the
> next you are confronted with your fragile world as it collapses.
>
>   I live eight blocks north of the world trade center. My windows
> face the buildings. I saw the planes crash into the buildings as I
> was doing my morning exercises. I saw the people jumping from the
> burning buildings. No it was not on videotape for me it was "bare life."
>
> I have a second home in northeastern Pennsylvania.  Huge rainstorms
> and snowmelts have flooded the Delaware River as well as many creeks
> and streams in the area.  People lose their homes. One teenage girl
> in Livingston Manor became paralyzed with fear and could not jump to
> safety as her home was swept away by the floodwater.  The floods are
> classified as one hundred year floods but they have occurred three
> times in the last three years.
>
> I consider myself lucky.  The World Trade Center didn't collapse on
> me, I am not yet in a hospital dying and I still have a home.
>
> It is almost impossible to make art about the WTC attack.  It is an
> enormous physical disaster as well as an information event. The same
> may be said of the New Orleans disaster that is still unfolding. The
> psyche of America is disturbed. It is now operating on a believe
> system that has no basis in reality. This narrative and its larger
> reality make a fitting subject for art.  The reduction to bare
> essentials, to mere survival, does not create the conditions for
> art.  If anything the art makes a counter proposition. For example,
> concentration camps are mentioned in the original Bare Life,
> question.  How does one make art about concentration camps?  I can
> think of several examples, Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus or Mel
> Brooks comedy film and Broadway play The Producers or Liliana
> Canvani's 1974 film The Night Porter or the 1960's TV sitcom Hogan's
> Heroes. I'm sure there are many more but these are the ones that come
> to mind.  They are not documentaries. They do not bear witness to the
> events. What they do is process a collective trauma and re-balance
> the human psyche.   This then is the true nature and value of art and
> the artist. The artist makes it possible to continue living in spite
> of a shattering event.  Make no mistake; art is not social work or
> psychoanalysis. Most of all it is not a diversion (divertissement) or
> entertainment. It is not about teaching (didacticism) or the
> marketing of high priced objects for the idle rich.  True art does
> not make one comfortable. What it does is reorder our sense of the
> world and our internal narrative.
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